I’m trying to find a higher paying job and I came across one for a “Syslog-ng Admin/Engineer.” The pay seems promising and the requirements aren’t that long but does ask for experience in syslog-ng. I’ve never heard of this before today. What is syslog-ng and what can I do to get experience with it?
man 8 syslog-ng and man 5 syslog-ng.conf
By “Syslog-ng Engineer” do they mean a C systems programmer who can fix bugs and add features to syslog? that’s a rather different role from being an admin; even if, depending on the size of the operation, it make sense to give both roles to the same person
other people have answered your question about syslog-ng and i thought i should share something that i wish someone had shared with me when i was studying up to on a job as an ELK administrator about a decade+ or so ago.
if you have familiarity with any of the non-journald based logging (eg rsyslog, syslog, etc.) and basic networking (eg tcpdump, traceroute, etc.) your experience will translate into syslog-ng well and there’s significant syntactical differences between the versions since it’s been around for decades now.
It’s an old school log aggragating service that used to be how most *nix distros collected logs in years past. As I understand it was generally replaced by systemd’s journald service. The only times I encounter it in the wild is on legacy systems that couldn’t or refused to adapt and chances are they’re paying a lot cuz it’ll be a painful support experience. Oh and for some it can be a useful way to sync logs up to monitoring services like Splunk but it’s effectiveness is debatable.
If ever getting to administrate non systemd boxes, and in need to deal with the system logging mechanism, then syslog-ng comes close to the most probable mechanism use. And no, non systemd gnu+linux distributions are not legacy, there are quite a few out there, just not the major or mainstream ones, like Artix, Void, Guix, and several others, not to count non gnu+linux OSs like BSDs…
